ATLANTA — Two truck drivers involved in last week’s 125-vehicle pileup on Interstate 75 will be charged with speeding and driving too long without a break, federal authorities said Thursday. The drivers will face charges by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates drivers and vehicles involved in interstate commerce. The agency said it would detail charges and release the drivers’ names today.
The morning pileup on March 14 killed five on a foggy stretch of I-75 near Ringgold, Ga., just south of Chattanooga. A Georgia State Patrol investigation is expected to take months. The federal agency said the drivers were "in the front" in the northbound lanes.
Twenty-one tractor-trailers were involved in the pileup, which started with a crash in the northbound lanes. There were 41 passenger vehicles damaged in the northbound lanes, and 25 in the southbound lanes.
Another 38 vehicles were caught in the mess but were undamaged.
"The charges do not mean they (the truck drivers) caused the crash," agency spokesman Michael Thomas said. "But we investigated them because they were in the front of the pack." Thomas said the drivers and their trucking companies will be fined $500 or more, depending on how fast they were driving and their driving records. The speed limit is 65 mph in that stretch. The state patrol is using photographs, drawings and eyewitness accounts to reconstruct the accident. Blood samples were taken from all 87 drivers whose vehicles were wrecked. The patrol said it will use that information to decide whether criminal charges will be brought against drivers.
"It will be at least six months," patrol spokesman Jim Shuler said.
Shuler said the pileup was rooted in four separate crashes, two in each lane. Traffic stopped behind initial crashes in each lane, and approaching vehicles then slammed into the stopped vehicles, he said.
All five people who died were in the northbound lanes.
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